Disassembled and shipped to the United States, the reassembled airship made its first flight in America from Langley Field, Va., on Nov. 15, 1921. Dissatisfied with the Roma's performance, the Army Air Service replaced its Ansaldo engines with more powerful Liberty engines.

The Roma airship disaster over Norfolk

The Roma as it sails over Granby Street on its first trial flight after its arrival from Italy.

Virginian-Pilot archives

Courtesy of nationalmuseum.af.mil

Courtesy of nationalmuseum.af.mil

Disassembled and shipped to the United States, the reassembled airship made its first flight in America from Langley Field, Va., on Nov. 15, 1921. Dissatisfied with the Roma's performance, the Army Air Service replaced its Ansaldo engines with more powerful Liberty engines.

Courtesy of nationalmuseum.af.mil

Approximate flight path of the Roma.

Courtesy of nationalmuseum.af.mil

Virginian-Pilot archives

Virginian-Pilot archives

Virginian-Pilot archives

The Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch on the news of the accident which took place only hours earlier.

Virginian-Pilot archives

A public funeral was held in Newport News for the victims of the disaster.

America suffered its worst aviation disaster of the time when, on Feb. 21, 1922, the Roma, a 410 foot long dirigible, crashed to the earth in Norfolk, Virginia.

Thirty-four men lost their lives.

This happened 15 years before the better known crash of the dirigible Hindenburg in New Jersey.

Selected text accompanying the images is taken from "Requiem for the Roma" by Pilot staff writer Earl Swift and published Feb. 16, 1997, in The Virginian-Pilot:

Built in Italy in 1919, its speed, its payload and its range had drawn attention throughout Europe before its purchase by the Army in 1921.

The craft around them was almost inconceivably big, and by the standards of the day, breathtakingly fast: 410 feet long, 92 feet tall, capable of hauling passengers and cargo at a mile a minute.

The Roma was semi-rigid, a compromise between zeppelins, which owed their distinctive cigar shapes to a light metal skeleton beneath their fabric skins, and blimps, which depended on the pressurized gas within their skins to maintain their form.

The Italian airship lacked a skeleton, but its gasbag was held somewhat in shape by a metal-ribbed nose cap and a rigid keel that ran along the bag's underside, from nose to tail. This keel housed the control room, navigation space, passenger cabin, the outriggers on which the engines rode, and – far astern – a huge, box kite affair that served as the ship's rudder and elevator.

In addition to the 11 cells of hydrogen within its skin, it housed six cells of air, called ballonets, into which additional air could be pumped if the gasbag drooped or flattened.

When Langley crews unpacked the crated airship that August, they found its fabric skin mildewed and weakened.

Six new, American-made Liberty motors, were ordered as replacements for the balky Italian powerplants.

At 12:45 p.m. on the 22nd, the preflight checks complete, 45 souls on the manifest – the crew, a few civilian mechanics, government observers – stepped aboard.

The rain had stopped. The temperature had warmed to 46 degrees.

One hundred fifty men gripped lines holding the airship to earth as the Roma's crew completed last-minute preparations for launch.

At 500 feet, Mabry (the ship's skipper) ordered cruising speed and, engines roaring, the Roma began making for the Chesapeake Bay.

It reached it near the mouth of the Back River. Mabry ordered the ship south along the shoreline, toward Old Point Comfort. The crew waved to people below at Fort Monroe, looked down on the site of the burned Hotel Chamberlin, at crowds on the government pier.

The Roma headed out over the water toward Willoughby Spit. The spit was dotted with waving Norfolkians agog at the mammoth craft overhead.

Mabry steered the Roma toward the Navy base.

After passing over the Spit and cruising over the Norfolk Naval Station, crewmembers noticed that the upper curve of the gasbag's nose was flattening.

The Roma, pitched nose-first toward the ground.

From far astern came a cry: The keel was slowly buckling.

Then another: The tail assembly was coming loose. The Roma began to bullet earthward at a 45-degree angle.

On the ground, sailors and civilian base workers watched the ship's nose tilt, and warehousemen at the Army's nearby Quartermaster Depot stepped outside to witness what was, clearly, an airship in trouble.

The skipper could see the greens and fairways of the Norfolk Country Club ahead, beyond the depot and the Lafayette River.

If they could get the Roma that far, they could put it down somewhat safely.

The passengers and crew, meanwhile, began to panic, to toss everything they could get their hands on through the keel's windows – tools, furniture, spare engine parts. People on the ground watched a shower of equipment fall to earth.

But the Roma's dive continued.

The ground rushing to meet the falling ship was a scrubby field at the depot, split by a small road – and by a high-voltage electric line.

The end came in a flash.

The Roma's nose hit the ground, its massive girth brushed the electric line, and in an instant it was engulfed.

Its gas cells, loaded with more than a million cubic feet of hydrogen, blew to atoms.

The blast set off the ship's gasoline tanks, creating a pyre of flame and smoke and din that leapt from the field and into the overcast sky.

Depot workers and sailors rushed to the wreckage, but the flames kept them back.

Three fire companies spent five hours quelling the blaze, and watched as the Army's greatest airship shrank to a pile of twisted aluminum that glowed red into the evening.

The Army launched an investigation into the accident – inconclusive, as it turned out – and a great public debate arose throughout the country over the safety of flight and the Roma's reliance on hydrogen.

''It was all over the place, talk about dirigibles and what made them blow up, how safe they were or weren't,'' recalled Carlton Macon, a 15-year-old Maury High School student at the time.

''Everybody had a story, it seemed like.'' The Chicago Daily Tribune perhaps best summarized the nation's struggle to make sense of the disaster. ''Uninformed people have no comment they can make upon the loss of the Roma,'' its editorial page advised, ''except as they may admire the fortitude and deplore the loss of the men who make the experiments with which the progress of man goes through its danger zone.''

No newsreel cameras were turning when the Roma exploded. No radio announcer sobbed of ''the humanity'' lost in its destruction.

The accident was, in terms of the images and sounds that preserve our memory of long-ago events, unwitnessed.

Newspapers stoked the story for a few weeks, but eventually the Roma slipped to the back pages, then out of print altogether.

But as the world grew jaded to death tolls, whether in aviation, in war or in accidents, the Roma and its dead faded completely from America's consciousness. A transient population in the city that witnessed the disaster helped erase its memory even here.

Few clues to its existence remain, locally. Langley, now a major Air Force base, still refers to a parking lot where the Roma's hangar stood as the ''LTA area,'' an acronym for ''lighter than air.''

The base's Roma Road is nearby. And there is the headstone at NIT. Its inscription tells nothing of the craft itself, nor the Army's zeal to fly it, nor of the lives lost aboard it.

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